The Pirate-Warden of Richmond

Commandant of Castle Thunder, a Confederate prison in Richmond, Va., Alexander possessed a theatrical flair. He had long black hair, a long black beard and fierce dark eyes, and he wore black pants, a black shirt and a black belt that held two huge pistols, a blackjack and two pairs of handcuffs. Sometimes he accessorized his grim outfit with a bright red sash, and he liked to strut around the prison with his huge black Russian boar hound, Nero, who was said to weigh 182 pounds.

Captain Alexander looked like a pirate — and in fact he was a pirate. He was also a playwright, a poet, a songwriter, an escaped convict and a crooked prison warden who ran an elaborate scheme to extract bribes from his more affluent inmates.

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Castle Thunder, Richmond, Va.Credit Library of Congress

At the start of the Civil War, Alexander quit the United States Navy and joined a band of Confederate pirates who seized Yankee ships in the Chesapeake Bay and sailed them to Richmond. Captured in July 1861, he was imprisoned in Baltimore’s Fort McHenry, but he escaped, leaping from a rampart and swimming to shore. He made his way back to Richmond and joined the city’s military police. A year later, he became commandant of Castle Thunder, a former tobacco warehouse that held men considered the lowest of war prisoners — among them Yankee deserters, Union spies, runaway slaves, rebel soldiers accused of crimes and Southerners suspected of disloyalty to the Confederacy.

“Without intending to inflict him with a compliment,” The Richmond Enquirer noted in a story on Alexander, “we must add that he is not only one of the most gallant but one of the handsomest men in the Confederate service.”

In March 1863, Alexander began displaying his gallant handsomeness onstage. He wrote a musical play called “The Virginia Cavalier” and included a cameo role for himself. The play’s toe-tapping showstopper was “The Southern Soldier Boy,” sung by the actress Sallie Partington, who played the devoted sweetheart of a Confederate soldier. The lyrics, written by Alexander, including a rousing chorus:

But the most dramatic moment in the play came when the author, dressed in his usual black ensemble, rode across the stage on a black horse, trailed by Nero, his huge black dog, as the audience cheered.

Critics were less enthralled. “The dialogue is stupid, the incidents are stale, and the plot ridiculous,” reported The Southern Illustrated News. “As the plot began to unfold itself, some of the literary gentlemen groaned inadvertently, and despondingly moved toward the door.”

But snooty reviews were hardly Alexander’s worst problem. Two weeks after the play opened, the Confederate Congress voted to investigate reports that Alexander tortured prisoners at Castle Thunder. For weeks, a committee of congressmen heard testimony from prisoners and prison workers who described how inmates were flogged, stuffed into “sweatboxes” and hung by their thumbs.

“The prisoners were stripped and whipped on their bare back, each receiving ten or 12 lashes laid on by the strongest man,” one prison employee testified. “The words Captain Alexander used while the whipping was going on were ‘Lay it on!’”

Some guards defended Alexander, claiming that only brutality could control such evil inmates. And several prisoners testified that the commandant treated them with amazing kindness, even permitting them to order food from local hotels. “I got my meals sent frequently from the hotels,” said one prisoner, “and always got more than I wanted.”

After the witnesses testified, Alexander made his closing statement. Summoning all his theatrical talent, he delivered a dramatic monologue about his heroics as a Confederate pirate: “We fell. I suffered. But thank God I escaped from the tyranny of the ‘usurper of rights’ and have tried to deal them some good blows.” At Castle Thunder, he said, he did only what was necessary to keep order among murderers, deserters and traitors. Standing solemnly before the congressmen, he announced that if they fired him from Castle Thunder, he would find some other way to fight for the Confederacy.

“No matter what may be said or done, you cannot keep this strong right arm idle!” he promised. “It shall work, either as officer or private, until we achieve what we are all struggling for — the vindication of a sacred right, self-government!”

Who could resist such selfless devotion to the Confederate cause? Not the congressmen. They voted to allow Captain Alexander to retain his job as prison commandant. So he returned to Castle Thunder, where he continued to treat most prisoners very badly but some — the ones who paid bribes — astonishingly well.

Alexander set up a country-club prison within Castle Thunder — the “citizens’ room,” a haven for about 50 affluent prisoners. While most of the prison’s 1,200 inmates slept on bare floors in overcrowded rooms, and subsisted on stale bread and maggot-speckled soup, the grandees of the citizens’ room slept on cots in a clean, well-lighted place and ate excellent food purchased from outside the prison.

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Alexander personally selected prisoners for the citizens’ room, choosing men with connections to Northerners willing to send money and boxes of food. Of course, there was a catch: the inmates had to share those gifts with Alexander and his cronies. Among the lucky prisoners in the citizens’ room were five reporters — Junius Browne and Albert Richardson of The New York Tribune and S.T. Bulkley, Leonard Hendrick and George Hart of The New York Herald — and they all received parcels of food and money from New York.

“We were the purple-robed patricians of the place,” Browne later wrote. “We had nocturnal lunches from our bountiful supplies and often sat over coffee and sardines and preserves, smoking our cigars.”

Two union spies also enjoyed the luxuries of this little oasis. Convicted of espionage and sentenced to hang, Pryce Lewis and John Scully seemed unlikely candidates for the prison’s cushiest quarters. For months, they’d languished in a squalid cell reserved for condemned prisoners but then they received a package from their boss, Allan Pinkerton. When guards discovered that it contained not only clothing but Confederate money, United States greenbacks and $20 in gold, Captain Alexander summoned the two spies to his office. He showed them the booty and announced that he was transferring them to the citizens’ room. He also informed them that they could use money sent from the North to buy food.

Lewis asked if he could purchase whiskey.

“Yes,” Alexander replied, “anything that money can buy.”

Much to their amazement, Lewis and Scully were soon ensconced in the citizens’ room, drinking whiskey and eating fine meals. Captain Alexander sometimes dropped by to show his latest poems to the inmates. “By praising his poetry,” Lewis noted, “it was easy to keep on the right side of him.”

Soon, Lewis and Scully were summoned to Alexander’s office to meet Humphrey Marshall, a corpulent lawyer who had previously served as a United States congressman and Confederate general. Marshall informed the two condemned spies that he could arrange to get them released if they’d each pay $500 in greenbacks. They agreed, and on Sept. 29, 1863, Lewis and Scully were sent north on a flag-of-truce boat.

“What a difference money makes,” Lewis later wrote, “even in the case of condemned prisoners.”

Rumors of rampant bribery at Castle Thunder spread through Richmond, and once again the authorities investigated Captain Alexander. In December 1863, Alexander was indicted on a charge of “malpractice in office,” accused of “extensive trade in greenbacks and accepting heavy bribes from prisoners.”

Tried by a court of inquiry, Alexander was acquitted, but fired from his job at Castle Thunder. He briefly worked in Confederate prisons in Danville, Va., and Salisbury, N.C., then returned to Richmond. After Appomattox, he feared he’d be prosecuted for war crimes so he fled to Canada, where he found a job teaching French.

He left Nero, his huge black boar hound, behind. Union soldiers captured the dog in Richmond and sent him to Manhattan, where he was auctioned off on the steps of the Astor House hotel to raise money for a soldiers’ charity. Bidders were warned not to wear blue around the dog because he’d been trained to attack anyone in a Union uniform.

Peter Carlson is a former reporter and columnist for The Washington Post. His latest book is “Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy: A Civil War Odyssey,” from which this article is adapted.

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One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America’s most perilous period — using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded.